


For the Tired and the Dreamers

by eudaimon



Category: War Boys (2009)
Genre: M/M, Post canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-11
Updated: 2012-12-11
Packaged: 2017-11-20 22:16:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/590237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eudaimon/pseuds/eudaimon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's a long road to recovery - after everything blows over, George and David head for New York.</p>
<p>And maybe everything turns out alright.  In the end.</p>
            </blockquote>





	For the Tired and the Dreamers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DeliaIsNotMyName](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeliaIsNotMyName/gifts).



> I love these boys and I agreed whole-heartedly with the sentiment of _just wanting to know what came next_.
> 
> So here it is. A version, at least. Title is from "Shake the Dust" by Anis Mogjani.
> 
> Happy Yuletide!

_**1: Separation** _

 

Later, much later, he’d have time to think about how quickly everything went completely to shit. In the hospital, there were double doors that they wouldn’t let him past, so he sat there on a hard plastic chair with Cat on one side of him and he thought about helicopters and gunshots and how it must have felt to be them, those people, the ones who were dying in the dark for days with nobody to hear them shouting.

Cat sighed and leaned her head against his shoulder. George was still figuring out how to be her brother, how to not be an asshole to her, so it took him longer than it should have to raise his hand and touch her shoulder, stroking his fingers down her arm. It was getting late and she was tired. He was tired too.

“What happened out there, George?” she asked him, quietly. “Is the Law comin’?” I’m with you if they do.”

She reminded him that, when they were kids, David was obsessed with cowboys. That changed and didn’t change as they got older; they still talked about frontiers a lot. They still knew a lot about borders.

What George never, ever knew was that the frontiers could be _in_ them, too.

“Maybe,” he said. “Probably. We did a bad thing, Cat. Me and David. Greg, too. We did a very bad thing and we’re going to have to pay for it.”

“Why didn’t they arrest you already?” 

They’d arrested Mr Welch. David’s dad. They hadn’t even let him ride in the ambulance with him; it’d just been George and Cat. George shrugged. There was blood under his fingernails - before the ambulance had come, he’d crushed his mouth against David’s, kissed him and tasted blood and spit. _Don’t leave me_ , he’d begged, and known that Cat had heard him.

“I don’t know,” he said, shaking his head. “Maybe they think we’re suffering enough already.”

She didn’t anything. She just fitted her hand into his.  
He held on tight.

*

They didn’t tell him much of anything, which wasn’t a surprise; what right did he have to be told anything? It wasn’t like they were married. It wasn’t like he was anything to David. His best friend, maybe. But not someone who got told things. Not someone to keep informed. Hearing nothing, he sat on a plastic chair. He tried to get comfortable but couldn’t. Maybe that was how it was supposed to be, though. Maybe none of them deserved to be comfortable again. And maybe hell would be a corridor, just like this one, lined with fucking uncomfortable chairs and a flickering light, and doors that only ever open one way.

He just couldn’t stop picturing them – those bodies in the dark.

The mom and dad arrived, which just drove home the fact that there was nobody coming for David but him. His dad clasped him on the shoulder, squeezed and George wished that the strength could leach into him like that, that he could feel stronger just by his dad being there. But he didn’t, couldn’t – his shoulders aged and his eyes stung, his chest tight and grasping and his stomach like a clenched fist.

A tear slipped and spilled down the side his nose. His mom came to sit beside him. With her on one side and Cat on the other, George felt safe in a way that he didn’t want to examine too closely. It felt fragile. Light. His mom stroked his hair. Cat traced the lines of his palm with the tip of one finger.

“Jesus, Mom,” he said, not crying, not really, but wishing that he could, if only to relieve the dreadful fucking pressure in his chest. It felt like every word was being dragged out of him on a wire.

“I know, baby,” she said, quietly, and he wanted to say _no, Mom, you fucking don’t_. Because she didn’t and she couldn’t, not when he was the one who crept into David’s bed, the one who smoothed his hands along David’s sides, kissed down the smooth skin stretched over David’s spine. She wasn’t the one who pressed close, his dick sliding against David’s skin, sweat making everything slicker, easier, and their breathing and their moaning and the sound of skin on skin. So much easier than the first time, better too – at fourteen, they’d barely known how to touch themselves, let alone each other. How to explain to her that, at its heart, it still felt the same – how to put into words the realisation that, all of these years, this was what being in love felt like?

How could he explain any of it to her? Yeah, she loved his dad but this? This exact feeling couldn’t exist anywhere else in the Universe. He refused to believe that he could. How would anyone survive?

*

_In the end, they scooped the ruin of David’s spleen clean out of him and stitched the wound shut on either side. Nobody bothered to explain to George why exactly people _need_ spleens. What he knew was that the bullet tore it and that it bled and bled right there in David’s body and that every gallon was a flood and that David nearly drowned in his skin._

George can’t think about all that without wanting to die himself, just a little bit.

David slept a lot. There were wires and tubes, blood and piss – George found it terrifying but he forced himself to stay, a fixture in a seat at the side of the bed. It took him a while to get up the nerve to reach out and hold David’s hand – loosely, at first, but then knotting their fingers together, holding on until his knuckles were white.

“Your house burned down,” he said, for lack of anything else to say. He had no other stories to tell. “But your truck’s fine. When you get out of here, we’re going to get in your truck and we’re going to start driving. I’m going to start driving.”

He’d looked it up on a map. He reckoned that it would take a whole day and most of the night to drive from New Mexico to New York, if neither of them stopped or came up for air., so it’d take them much, much longer, with David in the shape that he was in and George’s desire to never rush into anything again, so long as they live. To never fuck anything up again.

“Where are we going to go?” 

George hadn’t even realised that David was awake but there he was, squinting a little bit in the light, his fingers tight around George’s. His voice was rough and raw; they’d had to intubate him, hadn’t they? For a time, a machine had done his breathing for him. George didn’t think about think about any of the minutiae of it: the monitors, the sticky pads, the wires and tubes, draining piss and blood. He focused on David’s face and he didn’t think about any of it at all.

“New York,” he said. “We’re going to go all the way to New York and…we’ll get a shitty little apartment somewhere and you’ll do somethin’ with that fuckin’ brain of yours and I’ll probably drive a cab and we’ll be happy, okay? We’ll be happy forever.”

He didn’t say anything about making amends but he knew that they were both thinking it.  
A smile tugged at the corner of David’s mouth.

“And you can finally show me how to spell _relief_ ,” he said, voice giving, just a little bit, right at the end. But the fact that he could make a joke at all was so fucking comforting that it felt like a tiny warm flame flickering right in George’s chest.

“We’ll be happy,” he said again, because it bore repeating. “It’ll be the shittiest little apartment in the world because that’s all we’ll be able to afford. One of those ones with the bed in one corner and the kitchen in another and barely any room for the couch that we’ll have to get off the street because we can’t afford one of those either.”

“A studio,” said David, still with that raw edge to his voice. “They’re called studios.”  
Which seemed like a decent enough place to start.

*

_**2: Initiation** _

They went slowly. They didn’t really have any other choice. David was still healing, still knitting back together. He slept a lot, in the passenger seat or sprawled in the back seat. Sometimes, his breathing was so shallow that George had to twist in the driver’s seat to check that he was still breathing at all. In motel rooms, George knelt down next to him and peeled the dressing away. The wound wept, a little, bled but they had a print-out of what to look for, how infection would present and George saw no sign of it.

They couldn’t go quickly, not really, but they did cover miles every day. They stayed in shitty motels – not even the best that they could afford. The beds creaked and the water trickled out rusty and too cool as David leaned under the shower, eyes closed. Sometimes, it felt like even that, even the act of getting clean, was too much for him. Everything was. His body was shoving its way back together, finding new ways to be whole. It had to be exhausting. The surgical wound was on its way to healing, swallowing the bullet wound entirely. George couldn’t help but imagine how it might have looked, puckered like a star. A scar like that might have been good – it might have reminded them to never be so fucking stupid ever again. That, and that life was dangerous. And sometimes short.

At night, David slept heavily, sweated through the sheets and George found himself not really sleeping at all. He felt like he was keeping watching. It made him think of Cat, Cat when she was little, and how she’d still be scared of the dark. There were things there that terrified George. The sickness, for a start; David puked his guts up, into toilets and sinks and trash-cans, puked until there was no food left in him, no goodness, and what came up was yellow and foul. There was nothing that George could do. He knelt there with him and waited and suffered. But not as much. Never as much. 

David was doing penance for both of them.   
George drove.

“What do you think?” asked David, one night. They were lying close together, sheets and blankets drawn up over up over them, tangled around their feet. David slept in boxers and a t-shirt but George was naked and there was the faintest breeze filtering across his bare skin. He pushed one hand up under David’s t-shirt, grazed the edge of his dressing and pressed his whole palm against David’s heartbeat.

“What do I think about what?” he asked. Mostly, what he was thinking about was that neither of them had come since that last time, in David’s bed in his father’s house and that was kind of start to feel relevant again. Distantly, yes. But coming closer.

“About what happened,” said David. “What do you think’s happened to them?”  
“Now?” asked George, worrying his lip between his teeth for a moment, feeling that awful sinking sensation that he gets whenever he thought about those dreadful fucking things that they’ve done. “I guess they buried all of them…Right? The county, if nobody else.”

¬¬¬ “I keep thinking about them,” said David, eyes closed and fingers working back and forth against the soft skin of George’s hip. “About them lying there, in that fucking container in the dark. They must have shouted, you know? I keep imagining how…they could lie there forever like…like fucking…pharaohs in a tomb or…ancestors in the dirt and they’ll just…like…wear away to bone and dust and nobody’s ever going to set eyes on them again. They’ll just lie there. Just…holding hands in the dark.”

He turned his face to the side; George felt the tell-tale trickle of tears. He combed his fingers through David’s hair, pressed a kiss against his parting and shook his head.

“Don’t think about it like that,” he said, quietly. “They took them away and buried them. Cremated them, maybe. Everything’s clean. Cleanest thing in the world. Somebody took care of them. Promise. Your dad didn’t have time to burn the container. Everything’s okay.”

And he wanted to believe that that was true, desperately but mostly it just made him think of the smoke from the house on fire. Eventually, David slept but George stayed awake, listening to him breath, imagining it – the flames in the dark and thinking about how everything, all of their past, has already gone up in smoke. How they were completely without history. 

How they were free to go and how they finally had a chance to out-run their own deaths.

 

*

Go on, then.  
Go.

*

Imagine: a long stretch of road and David in the passenger seat. George learned to drive from his dad and he considered himself safe, careful. From time to time, he stole a glance at David, awake for once and reading, half leaned against the truck door. He was reading a battered copy of a Kurt Vonnegut novel that had been familiar to both of them since freshman year of high school. On the radio, Joe Strummer was singing about his long, long shadow. There are about a hundred things that George wanted to say, right then. He wanted to ask David how they ever waited this long to be like this and did it mean the same thing when they were fourteen and fumbling in the dark? He wanted to know if David always thought of him like this and if this was really, truly what being in love felt like. If it was possible to have been in love since he was a kid, to have been in love all of that time and never known. He wanted to tell David that what he thought about, mostly, was fucking in a bed and really taking his time; he wanted to tell David about the fantasies he had, the notions of slip-slide, push-shove, of lingering over David’s bare skin. Wanted to talk about the extensive time that he’d dedicated to thinking about David’s dick, which wasn’t something that he’d ever imagined. He wanted to lean in and tell him that he’d thought about it in his hand again, in his mouth – that he dreamed of being inside him and that he’d stopped dissecting whether or not that was okay. Because it didn’t matter if it was okay or not. Because they were rewriting rules. Or they were beyond rules. They’d broken them all. They were on their own now. George had never been that good at expressing his feelings – he’d never been that good at saying what was on his mind. But this was David, so maybe he didn’t have to? Not if they’d always known each other, even in the dark. He almost asked what David was reading but knew that he didn’t have to, not when David had read that novel over and over again since they were kids. _There's only one rule that I know of, babies — "God damn it, you've got to be kind_ ; he remembered lying side by side and David reading him that line, his head turned so that his mouth was close to George’s ear and George could feel his breath on his skin. George reached out with one hand and grazed David’s knee and meant _I love you more than I have any idea how to put into words._

*

In a convenience store with faded green linoleum on the floor, George leaned against a freezer and watched the girl on the register flirt with David for all that she was worth. To George, David still looked kind of sick – pale, with shadows under his eyes – but he smiled, catching his weight against the heel of his hand on the edge of the counter as they talked. George didn’t feel jealous. Even then, he could be an asshole, could walk up behind David and sling an arm around his shoulders or his waist, squeeze his ass through his jeans or press a kiss against the sharp line of his jaw. But why would he? 

Already, he felt like a done deal. 

They bought cookies and juice, fruit, bread and butter. The girl wrote her phone number on the back of the till receipt. George tucked it into the pocket of his jeans.

This motel was better than a lot of the others: the bed was wide, the sheets were clean and there was good water pressure in the shower. With the groceries still on the counter, David sprawled on the bed, one arm thrown across his eyes. George sat down on the edge of the mattress and tugged off David’s boots one at a time. Battered, beat up combat boots that David had been wearing since they were kids; he dropped each one at the foot of the bed and then guided David’s foot into his lap, curling his hand around it, pressing his thumbs against the soul.

David groaned and arched his back.

“Good?” asked George, grinning.  
“So fucking good,” said David, eyes closed. “You’ve got magic hands.”  
“That’s what she said,” said George, still grinning. He let David’s foot slip out of his lap and crawled up the mattress, bending down to kiss David’s mouth. They’d been naked together since New Mexico but only like this, almost chastely, side by side or curled together in the bed. They touched, but gently: George’s fingers grazing against David’s side, David’s head falling back against his shoulder. They kissed in whispers. It was an odd feeling: to have known each other for as long as they had and to still be figuring each other out. 

George’s hand slid over David’s hip, down over the line of his dick through his jeans, squeezing gently. David bit his lip and shifted his hips. Shuffling, George got closer until he was pressed all along David’s side – the familiar, warm length of him. George lost count of how many times they’d slept side by side.

“You want a blowjob, frat-boy?”

What they both knew: that ‘frat boy’ was a joke in and of itself, because David never joined a frat up at Duck, because he didn’t need to know what brotherhood felt like. That there were no girls to fuck at Duck but there had been boys, enough boys, but that none of them had worked their way into David’s heart.

George knew this because David had told him this.

“Fuck yes,” breathed David, so soft that George felt the words rather than heard them, his cheek against David’s shoulder.

The first time that George gave a blow-job, he felt awkward and strange, intensely conscious of every move than either him or David made. David had been typically considerate about it, lying as still as he could, never lifting his hips off the bed to push deeper. He’d warned George before he came but George had stayed where he was, out of loyalty or love or stubborn curiosity. David coming in his mouth that first time had been a surprise – the sensation, yeah, but also the fact that he hadn’t hated it. Not even a little. He hadn’t managed to swallow, that first time, shielding with his hand as he spat into a paper cup to look up and find David grinning at him. He’d leaned down for a kiss without wiping his mouth.

This time, he went down on David slowly, taking his dick as deep into his mouth as he could before pulling back. He sucked in long, slow strokes, taking his time, not even really focused on making David come – just revelling in the fact that he was in his mouth, that his senses were overwhelmed and flooded with him. That they could do this and go on doing this forever. David’s fingers slid over George’s hair and George’s hand gripped David’s hip, pushing him down against the bed. He found himself getting more and more possessive of David, not around girls like that one in the convenience store but at times like these, quiet times; the times when he knew that David was entirely his anyway.

What he’d figured out in the times that he’s done this (times that he can still count on his fingers – he wondered if there would come a time when they’d done it so many times that he loses count and forgets specifics. He hoped not. He wanted to remember every single time) – David started to tremble, finely, just before he came and that his breathing softened like he was on the verge of falling asleep.

Afterward, George kissed David’s belly, his ribs, the edge of the dressing and his nipple before he reached the point of his chin.

“Good?” he asked.

David nodded; George found himself grinning.  
So many things were getting easier, day by day.

It took a couple of minutes, easing them both out of their clothes, getting under the sheets. They arranged themselves close together, David on his side and George pressed against his back, his dick snug against the curve of David’s ass. He’d gotten hard while he was going down on David, but it hadn’t occurred to him to ask for anything in return. David shifted, pushing back against him and George moaned before he could catch himself.

“You should have said,” said David, starting to turn over. “I’d have – “  
“You don’t have to,” said George, shaking his head, but David rolled over and George shifted closer, moved as David moved, parting his knees to let David’s thigh in between them. Lying like that, they could move closer, close enough that George’s dick was pressed against David’s skin, sliding in the sweaty heat between them. David leaned in and kissed him, hard and hungry and George gave up then, let himself get lost in it. With the way David was kiss him, the way David’s hands slid over his skin, it didn’t take long before he was gasping, hips jerking into the press of David’s body against his. In the end, all it took was David scraping the edge of his thumbnail across his nipple to make him come, moaning into David’s mouth.

They lay there, panting, sheets all but kicked off. George knew that he ought to get out of bed, ought to go and shower or, at the very least, wipe everything off, but, in the end, he just leaned across David’s chest to snatch a t-shirt off the floor. They made do.

In the dark, so close that the tips of their noses were almost touching, David’s fingers skimmed along his arm.

“I think we’ll get to New York tomorrow,” said George, eyes already closed. Drifting.  
“What are we going to do when we get there?” asked David.

George shrugged, his fingers drifting to the small of David’s back, stroking back and forth.

“Figure it out,” he said. “Be kind.”  
Even in the dark, he could feel David smile.

“Baby,” he said, breathing it in the dark. “You’ve gotta be kind.”

*

_**3: Return** _

The apartment wasn’t much, but it’s a start. In Brooklyn, George found work with a garage, started driving a cab, and David got a job as a barista, not in a chain place, not a fucking _Starbucks_ but a little place with wooden tables and mismatched chairs. He hung out at the counter when there was nothing to do, idly writing in notebooks. Maybe one day, something would come of it. He brought home pastries and learned to cook. George renovated chairs and dressers on a dust-sheet in the box room, sold them to a boutique up in Williamsburg. Bit by bit, they made do.

George thought about his dad a lot, mostly when he was in the cab cruising without a hire. He thought about his dad on his knees, stencilling his company name onto the side of his car. George had never been the praying type but he hoped that his dad would forgive him, that he still loved him, no matter what had happened.

Sometimes, he’d pick up the phone and just hold it in his hand, thinking about all of them. It took him a long, long time to make the call.

*

The wound made a neat, white scar.

And somehow, they managed five years, one bit at a time. David went back to college. George stopped driving the cab altogether and started renovated furniture full-time. He was never going to make enough money to change their lives entirely, but it was enough – enough to help David with college, enough to keep them afloat. They moved out of the shitty apartment and into one that was slightly less shitty. They didn’t ever talk about it but, one day, George brought home rings – simple, hammered bands made by an artist friend. They fucked on the kitchen table with David’s legs up around his waist and George had marvelled at how a little scrap of metal could catch so much light.

*

“Who’s on the phone?” asked George, coming in through the door with an armful of groceries, snow clinging to the shoulders of his jacket. David must have been working – there are kids’ notebooks half-graded and scattered all across the sitting room floor. David was in the kitchen, the phone cradled between his shoulder and his cheek, halfway through dinner.

“Cat,” said David, holding out the phone. “She wants to come visit. You talk to her while I finish this.”

George took the phone, leaning against the counter to talk to Cat. He could never get over how old she sounded these days, how grown into herself. Back in the day, they prided themselves on the guarding the border like it fucking mattered, like borders weren’t something arbitrary, man-made – like they could be seen from space. Like you couldn’t pick a border and make it yours and criss-cross it as many times as you wished.

“Yeah, sure,” he said, nodding. “Your room’s here waiting. We’re waiting.”

There were still borders, he knew that – but from where he stood, they seemed a long, long way off, the world blown open wide and full of possibility. David slipped in behind him, wrapped one arm around him and pressed a kiss against the side of his neck. George imagined that he could feel David’s heartbeat thumping against his spine, hard and healthy.

Sometimes, he still thought about how everything went to shit so quickly, how it took them so long to make their way back.

**Author's Note:**

> NOTE: Chapter Titles (Separation, Initiation, Return) are a simplification of the stages of the 'Hero's Journey' as laid out by Joseph Campbell. It seemed to fit.


End file.
